The main goal of my project is to allow creators of HISE instruments to incorporate Faust code into their finished product. Up until this point my focus was on just-in-time compilation in order to aid rapid development: You can change the Faust source code, click reload and now the same DSP node behaves differently. While this is really helpful during development, for the finalized product this approach has some drawbacks:

• There is some latency when loading the plugin until the code will have been compiled
• Even though the code doesn't change anymore, it will be recompiled every time ¹
• The compiler (llvm) needs to be installed on every system the instrument will be used on

For those reasons we decided early on to have a statically compiled alternative for when the instrument is ready to be released. The basic idea is:

• Compile the Faust code to C++
• Wrap the generated code into a HISE DSP node
• Export a project archive which includes the generated code for each distinct Faust source that is used in the project

The Faust compiler can do the transpilation to C++, but instead we can also use libfaust to do the same without having to handle spawning the compiler process:

  generateAuxFilesFromString(const std::string& name_app, const std::string& dsp_content, int argc,
			     const char* argv[], std::string& error_msg);

When we want to export our project, we can replace the call to createDSPFactoryFromString() with a call to generateAuxFilesFromString() and put the files into the export directory. HISE will include all files in that directory and make our generated DSP class visible.

  class _mydsp : public dsp {
	  // ...
  };

This class implements the dsp interface just like the llvm_dsp-object which createDSPInstance() returns in the JIT version. To make a node which uses this class internally visible in HISE, we need to have its type defined in a specific namespace. To accomplish this for a number of generated classes, templates will be our tool of choice. In the end we want to have a wrapper node, which takes the name of the generated class as a template parameter.

  namespace TODO!! {
	  using mydsp = faust_node<_mydsp>;
  }

For each generated DSP class we need to generate a header file similar to the above, where we define a node type using the faust_node<> class template. This node shares a lot of logic with the previous JIT implementation, so instead of writing it from scratch, we divide the old JIT faust_node into a JIT-specific part and a base part, which is the parent class for both variants.

  template <class FaustDsp>
  class _faust_node: faust_base_node {
	  _faust_node(DspNetwork* n, ValueTree v):
		  faust_node_base(n, v),
		  faust(std::make_unique((faust_base_wrapper*)(new faust_wrapper<FaustDsp>)))
	  { }		      
  };

We pass along the template parameter FaustDsp to a templated version of faust_wrapper, which we separate similarly to faust_node into a JIT-specific part and a non-JIT-specific part. Here we instantiate the generated FaustDsp class and assign it to a pointer with the purely abstract type dsp which we wrapped previously into the faust namespace.

  template <class FaustDsp>
  struct faust_wrapper : faust_base_wrapper {
	  faust_wrapper():
		  faust_base_wrapper(),
		  faustDsp((::faust::dsp*)(new FaustDsp))
	  { }

	  ~faust_wrapper() {
		  delete (FaustDsp*)faustDsp;
	  }
  };

The remaining code in faust_wrapper remains mostly the same, especially process(), which handles the input buffer and calls the virtual compute() method of our FaustDsp class, which implements the DSP algorithm.